Nuclear power and the US

One educated as a Nuclear Engineer and having to leave it for its speed in implementation, design, regulatory oversight, lack of innovation, etc., the article on Fox Business "Delays for SC nuclear plant further pressure industry" here, further highlights how the US continues to lag the rest of the world.

Nuclear will be an essential ingredient in the success of energy for all.  The article on WSJ details the various concerns here.

Silicon Valley in 2015 and onwards: A new technology decade on its way

I have been working with Silicon Valley for the past 20 years off and on.  I have been living here for the past year, running a research and innovation center.

For the first decade of this millennia, I noticed a trend which was well articulated by Dr. Gordon Moore that "… corporate R&D is moving away from the kind of fundamental research that wins Nobel Prizes and toward a narrow focus on business goals."  See my blog on the topic here.

I start this year with the hope and I see it as well in the past couple of years that things are making a shift in Silicon Valley from Dr. Moore's concern.  In The World in 2015 from the Economist, my favorite columnist Mr. Adrian Wooldridge, writes:

"In 2015 the buzz (and the money that goes with it) will shift from social media to intelligent devices. … The most successful companies will focus on connecting the virtual and physical worlds. … The year’s buzzword will be “wearables”: for example, medical gadgets that keep a constant watch on your blood pressure, glucose level and food intake, and tell you if trouble is on the way."

Remembering the days of craze about social media in the first half of 2000s, and software doing more than automation in the 1990s, and personal computer like devices in the 1980s, the craze already has established the buzz word IOT (Internet of Things).  Makes me smile as I have never heard such an amorphous term in technology before, perhaps IOT will trump the word innovation in the coming years!  I digress.

What is absolutely thrilling and exciting for me is:

"The rise of intelligent devices will allow the Valley to rediscover its roots as an engineering centre. This Valley was briefly sidelined by the social-networking revolution. But engineers are returning to reclaim their own. Tesla is making cars in Palo Alto. BMW, Mercedes, Samsung, Nissan and General Electric have all established research and design laboratories. Medical-device companies are flocking in."

The types of business that are emerging interestingly all have one specific aspect in common, or essential to their success, data and its analysis for value extraction.  A different technology decade is beginning in the valley.

"Intelligent devices will provide the Valley with a new-found seriousness. Social-media companies essentially dealt with virtual candy-floss: nice to have but, for the most part, hardly essential. The new generation of entrepreneurs will deal in devices that can save lives. Truly, all that is airy will become solid."

Read the complete article here.

Gensler surveys design in work space

One of the design and architecture companies I follow is Gensler.  Most of their work shows that they comprehend the user and the consumer of the space well.  See Gensler here.

Mr. Gerald Gehm, Managing Director, Gensler, forwarded the this work space survey to me "2013 U.S. Workplace Survey; Key Findings."  Worth reading!

I took the liberty of pulling the following visual from one of Gensler's publications.  It describes the "work modes" an office worker lives.  Key is focus versus what has become the goal of work spaces i.e., collaboration.

See my previous blog "Design in work space" here; see my blogs on design in general here.

Design in work spaces

Are you working in an open office environment where the only thing the collaborative spaces drive you to is a deep desire to make another version of the Harlem Shake?

"Excessive collaboration can lead to the very opposite of creativity; groupthink, conformity and mediocrity."

Google's Venice Beach, California, USA offices.

The laggards in the industry, not revenue based but ones who do not have an impetus to relentlessly innovate, are trying to be Googlist in the environments they create for their employees.  With neither an understanding of their employees behavior nor how the users or consumers of the spaces they design, these faux Bauhaus architectures lie around as relics as soon as they are birthed.

"Over the past five years Gensler, a design firm, has asked more than 90,000 people in 155 companies in ten industries what they think of this way of working. It has found an astonishing amount of antipathy. Workers say that open-plan offices make it more difficult to concentrate, because the hubbub of human and electronic noise is so distracting. What they really value is the ability to focus on their jobs with as few distractions as possible."

Design is driving the question of who is the user and the consumer of whatever we engage in, and interior design for professional work environments is no exception.  The corporations that do not live on the leading edge are trying to copy experiments in employee environment development from the bleeding edge companies that are not best practices.  If you are not a Google, which innately has the DNA of allowing to fail fast to learn, you should consider caution as in Schumpeter's article in The Economist here.

Design in engineering

"... without the proper design, without considering how new products and services fit into people’s day-to-day lives, any new technology can be terrifying."

States the article in Wired here.

How many engineers in the world comprehend the power of design in bringing the intuition to life in a product?  Why do I ask? Because all products offer services, and if a product does not, it ceases to exist.

I welcome challenges to my belief above.

"The task of making this new world can’t be left up to engineers and technologists alone—otherwise we will find ourselves overrun with amazing capabilities that people refuse to take advantage of. Designers, who’ve always been adept at watching and responding to our needs, must bring to bear a better understanding of how people actually live. It’s up to them to make this new world feel like something we’ve always wanted and a natural extension of what we already have."

"Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect."

Design was introduced into my life when I was working at NCR Human Interface Technology Center. There were sociologists and psychologists working on designing experiences in virtual spaces.  It was fascinating to learn about how and why human beings act and behave the way they do and how to incorporate it via HCI and UXUI.

"But as designers move off of screens and into the larger world, they’ll need to consider every nuance of our everyday activity and understand human behavior every bit as well as novelists or filmmakers. (Otherwise they may engender the same kind of backlash as Google Glass, a potentially cool product that has unleashed a torrent of privacy concerns.)"

So, where can the engineer impact design?  Just look at a Mac logic board and one for a PC; the beauty of the Mac board makes grown up electrical engineers cry, or hide in their cubicles because they know such marvels are not their realm.

And for the software engineer:

"“AI is the new UI.” That is, the effort and attention that designers once poured into interfaces should be extended to code that doesn’t just react to the push of a button but anticipates your actions."

Human memories are of experiences; experiences are part art, part science; the right and the left brain has to come together for such to be accomplished.  We are steadily on our way.  I am afraid the industry doesn't have leaders like Steve Jobs to drive it.

Large corporations and the desire to innovate

About a year ago, I read a three part blog series on large corporation's inability to innovate, particularly the breakthroughs that produce growth versus value results, at the Harvard Business Review website.  There are a few bits of information in the blogs that are valuable to be reminded of:

From the first blog here:

"Big companies are really bad at innovation because they're designed to be bad at innovation."

This is a generalization and perhaps shows a lack of experience on the author's part.  There are large companies like Procter & Gamble who have turned the model of innovation on its head.  While I was at P&G with its $84B in revenue, the company was spending over 5% on R&D, though interestingly over half of the funding was capturing innovation from the outside and being applied into its products.

In the second blog here:

"Mature corporations are designed to execute on the science of delivery — not engage in the art of discovery. They're bad at innovation by design: All the pressures and processes that drive them toward a profitable, efficient operation tend to get in the way of developing the innovations that can actually transform the business."

I cannot disagree with the above statement.  An ideal example of incrementalism driving efficiency is the much touted Six Sigma methodology.  It superbly squeezes out the last ounce of productivity from the humans and machines in the process, but it does not deliver any transformative breakthroughs.

From the third blog in the series here:

"No company ever dazzled the world by lackadaisically going after a market. Executives never reach the pinnacle of their industry by consistently taking timid action. So why, despite all the evidence to the contrary, do we see so many corporations dip their toes into the pool of innovation instead of diving in? Corporate innovation is already a difficult proposition; why doom it to failure by pursuing it half-heartedly?"

In this blog the author discusses Xerox PARC and how it has been the precursor to significant number of todays breakthroughs; while Xerox itself today is a poor reflection of what it could have been.  Another example of course is Kodak.

I believe that most large corporations live a self fulfilling prophecy of inevitably trapping themselves into linear cycle of starting with a breakthrough idea to accelerated growth to growth to value to sustain to divest (or bankruptcy) and ending in ceasing to be what they were or could have been. Yet, rare it is, exceptions do exist to prove the rule!  Perhaps perpetual growth is simply not possible.  Can Apple continue to wow the consumer forever?

What business can learn from military

One of the delights each week for me is to read Schumpeter in The Economist.

"Military mottoes make strong men cry:("The few, the proud"; "Who dares wins"). Most corporate mission statements make desk warriors cringe with embarrassment."

Military in however small or large a form or design has been one of the oldest institutions in the world.  They have always had a special forces concept and the general armed forces.  That is what the astute corporations are doing as well - creating a front end of innovation arm feeding the products or services development and deployment organizations.

Schumpeter's article here highlights the wealth of experience a military men and women bring to the table and their value to today's businesses.  The education provided to the military has tremendous knowledge embedded in it, with a few millennia of detailed case studies to learn from.

"An officer must never issue an order that will not be obeyed, so he must learn to gauge the mood of his men."

I had the opportunity to work with three corporate leaders across four companies who interestingly all were West Point graduates. Another individual, a colonel gave me the best advice when I choose to build two companies out of the ashes of the economic meltdown of 2008; "Recon ten times before you attack."  Because once the battle has begun, you are in it - in business, or otherwise.

Design and customer experience

"No one buys a Swiss watch to find out what time it is.  The allure is intangible: precise engineering, beautifully displayed."

So states an article in The Economist.  Why does one drive a BMW versus a Ford?  "Precise engineering beautifully displayed."

See the graph to illustrate the point.

See more of my blogs related to design here.

Innovation in practice

I prescribe to the following definition of innovation: "A novel idea, put into practice that offers value to the customers and/or the society." Fisher, Biviji, & Nair, 2011.

Dr. Sebastian Thrun's (top, right) Stanford University team won the 2005 DARPA Challenge for an autonomous automotive. I choose to kick-off 2013 with this example of innovation in practice as it highlights two foundational facts regarding product innovation:

• Traditional product development methods with unlimited resources and funding can produce results, but not necessarily innovation.
• Innovation is about novel ways of doing things, which must disrupt with very large positive margins the cost of doing business, or time to market or resource requirements or all.

Dr. Thrun's team was substantially smaller than his competition Dr. Whittaker who had over one hundred strong team.  Dr. Whittaker had a war chest of $3,000,000.  It is simply delightful to see how different the two approaches are and how Dr. Thrun won the DARPA Challenge.

A key highlight of Dr. Thrun's approach was to quickly identify commoditized processes and technologies, leverage the power of commoditization to focus on the breakthrough from the start.  As stated in "Stanley: The Robot that Won the DARPA Grand Challenge":

"Before both the 2004 and 2005 Grand Challenges, DARPA revealed to the competitors that a stock 4WD pickup truck would be physically capable of traversing the entire course. These announcements suggested that the innovations necessary to successfully complete the challenge would be in designing intelligent driving software, not in designing exotic vehicles. This announcement and the performance of the top finishers in the 2004 race guided the design philosophy of the Stanford Racing Team: Treat autonomous navigation as a software problem."

Read the complete paper "Stanley: The Robot that Won the DARPA Grand Challenge" here.  Watch the PBS video of the race and be inspired to innovate.  The transcript of the video is available here.

Info-Gap Theory

By way of my dear friend Dr. Farrokh Mistree, I have had an introduction to Yakov Ben-Haim, Professor and Yitzhak Moda'i Chair in Technology and Economics, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and his work on Info-Gap:

"INFO-GAP THEORY is a method for analysis, planning, decision and design under uncertainty. The future may differ from the past, so our models may err in ways we cannot know. Our data may lack evidence about surprises: catastrophes or windfalls. Our scientific and technical understanding may be incomplete. These are info-gaps: incomplete understanding of the system being managed. Info-gap theory provides decision-support tools for modelling and managing severe uncertainty. Three ideas are central in an info-gap analysis: robustness to uncertainty, satisfying critical requirements, and exploiting favorable opportunities."

I plan to speak with Yakov in the near future and will post more on the subject. See Yakov's site here.

GE Energy Innovation Summit - Multidisciplinary and Accelerated

I had the opportunity to design, convene and execute a two day, first one of its kind, multidisciplinary GE Energy Innovation Summit with an elite team of GE Energy engineers. I have been impressed with the fact that GE Energy chose to lead such a transformational activity, yet more so, I have been working with some of the best engineering minds in the industry here.

The Summit brought together ten external world leaders in areas from government policy and oil and gas to data analytics, top tier academia and successful entrepreneurs. They were joined by ten GE Energy leaders from Marketing, Systems Engineering, and Advanced Technology Operations. Our goal was to create two energy concepts for GE Energy products and services that are 3 to 5 years out and can be taken forward to conduct proof-of-concepts.

Not only did the Summit deliver the concepts, it created two solutions with clear value to the company and its customer for the future as well as business models to take the solutions forward. Most importantly, during the summit senior leadership committed funding for these solutions on the spot.

Farrokh Mistree - Outstanding Design Educator Award

Having had the honor of working with Dr. Farrokh Mistree for the past five years, what a thrill it is to see this come to fruition:

"(Dr. Mistree) is being recognized for lifelong dedication and numerous contributions to the engineering design community, particularly for instilling a passion for design in generations of students as an inspirational advisor and mentor. He will receive the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Design Educator Award."

Details here.

I can personally attest to Farrokh being one of the few individuals I know who lives the concept of "Sharing to Gain". It was this passion of his that convinced me five years ago to join him in developing "Designing Open Engineering Systems" course at Georgia Tech, along with Dr. Jitesh Panchal, and Dr. Dirk Schaefer.

Farrokh continues to inspire and give of his time freely in sharing to gain!

US Patent Changes!

Having written about patents in general, see here, here and here, the new changes USPO are creating excitement!

From Yahoo News, details here:

"The most substantial change brought about by the bill would be to switch the United States to a "first-inventor-to-file" system for patent applications used by all other industrialized countries rather than the current "first-to-invent" system. Supporters say the first-to-file system would put American innovators on the same page as their overseas competitors, making the process simpler, more certain and less expensive."

From The Hill, details here, the reader comments are enjoyable.

From The Wall Street Journal, details here:

"The Patent Office would also gain power to set its own funding, a move that is likely to mean higher application fees but also greater resources to process an application backlog that exceeds 700,000."

From The New York Time, details here:

"... the House is unlikely to take up a patent bill anytime soon, and people with an interest in the patent system say they expect its bill to be significantly different."

"Many smaller companies and inventors opposed the change, however, arguing that it favored companies that could hire legions of lawyers to quickly file applications for new permutations in manufacturing or product design."

"A consortium of technology and computer companies are already lobbying House members to resist addressing procedures to re-examine patents in their bill. The Information Technology Industry Council, whose members include Dell, Google, I.B.M. and Microsoft, said in a letter to Mr. Leahy earlier this month that it opposed the bill’s provisions to alter how patents could be re-examined, asserting that this would increase litigation rather than reduce it."

Teaching Sales for an Innovation's Success?

From a letter in Financial Times of Feb 3rd 2011:

"During my own executive MBA at Imperial College Business School (2008-10) there was the six-month IED (innovation, entrepreneurship and design) module – the idea behind it was to take a product or service from “just” an idea to the business plan stage. Interestingly (especially as Imperial College is in the FT top 10 for “entrepreneurship”) there was not one lesson on sales. I suggested to the course director that students should pick a product or service and during one weekend go out on the streets of London and sell as much as possible – the students would keep the money they made and the highest grades would be awarded to those who made the most money. I am yet to receive a reply."

See the article referenced here.

Lateral Innovation - Network Problem Solution from Nature

I analyze "adjacencies" and "lateralities" in innovation to discover solutions from industries a sector specific or vertical expert perhaps may not choose to.  Here is an excellent example of engineering solutions for network problems validated in natural organisms through the research of Atsushi Tero at PRESTO, Japan Science and Technology Agency in his recently published paper in the Science, "Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design".  The abstract:

"Transport networks are ubiquitous in both social and biological systems. Robust network performance involves a complex trade-off involving cost, transport efficiency, and fault tolerance. Biological networks have been honed by many cycles of evolutionary selection pressure and are likely to yield reasonable solutions to such combinatorial optimization problems. Furthermore, they develop without centralized control and may represent a readily scalable solution for growing networks in general. We show that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum forms networks with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost to those of real-world infrastructure networks—in this case, the Tokyo rail system. The core mechanisms needed for adaptive network formation can be captured in a biologically inspired mathematical model that may be useful to guide network construction in other domains."

The researchers grew the slime mold using 36 oat flake template representing cities around Tokyo, while they placed the mold itself on Tokyo.  The paper states:

"Overall, we conclude that the Physarum networks showed characteristics similar to those of the rail network in terms of cost, transport efficiency, and fault tolerance.  However, the Physarum networks self-organized without centralized control or explicit global information by a process of selective reinforcement of preferred routes and simultaneous removal of redundant connections."

Open publication - Free publishing - More network

Culture and Consumer Choices

The article "Cultural research tour reveals who likes what" in the Financial Times discusses the disparities in consumer behavior when it comes to jewelery here.  For the astute, this also provides insights in luxury and aspirational consumer goods and services as well.  In emerging markets of China and South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), jewelery provides the deepest insights as it represents social standing as well as continuation to brand loyalty as it can be a significant both monetarily and as an emotive purchase.

"In the US today, the average price of a piece of diamond jewellery is $199, while in China it is $1,000 - David Rudlin, Japan-based global marketing director for De Beers’ Forevermark"

The article did not highlight though whether the jewelery industry is a follower or a predecessor to overall consumer markets trend?  Or does it stay constant?  That would be valuable information.

Few more interesting trends, for example, the difference in American and Japanese consumers overall are highlighted simply:

"In the US, 80 per cent of diamonds sold are for the bridal market. The American market is more ready than the Japanese to sacrifice quality for size... “The Japanese reject anything with even invisible flaws,” says Mr Rudlin."

"The biggest jewellery chain in the world, Chow Tai Fook, has 1,000 stores in China and will have 2000 by 2020. In China, 70 per cent of the market is made up of solitaire wedding rings, which are relatively easy to design and manufacture."

"“India, with its jewellery culture inspired by maharajas, is unlike anywhere else in the world,” says Mr Rudlin. “The demand is skewed to elaborate multi-stone pieces, with a focus on necklaces, earrings, bracelets and bindis and hair jewels.”"

Shoppers Reality at the Shelf

Having been the Architecture Leader at Procter & Gamble on the shopper and consumer virtualization platforms, I am thrilled to see that the statistics still hold true when you and I stand in front of the shelf to make the buy or not to buy decision.  My work was covered in AG Lafley's book "Game Changer" blogged here by friend and colleague Franz Dill.  Franz was instrumental in setting up the P&G Innovation Centers, now enabling P&G to be the leader in shopper and consumer insights to impact product development at the concept stage:

"In the Bases research, the biggest driver of new-product awareness in store was simply seeing the product on the shelf -- accounting for product awareness in 71% of cases where people cited the store. All the other tools marketers and retailers use to drive in-store awareness -- including off-shelf displays, retailer circulars, product demos, in-store media and samples, accounted for awareness in only 2% to 18% of those cases. In-store media and product demos both scored in the low single digits. That helps drive home the importance of packaging and signage, Mr. Twitty said."

States the article "This Upfront, P&G May Want to Boost Spend on Piggly Wiggly" here. 

Though AdAge's graph here from Nielsen showcases the impact of shopper based design, shopper driven marketing communication, shopper based package design, etc. see below a video from the Economist on the impact of TV on the shopper and the consumer.

World Retailing: Consumerism and The West

In the Financial Times World Retailing this month, "Consumption starts to shift to China, India and Brazil" discusses that the average shopper and consumers balance sheets are in better shape than they were a year ago.  Yet, the article states:

"But if the consumer is coming back to malls and high streets, their attitudes are changing, according to recent research.

Consumers around the world are reining back spending on non-essential items, according to Datamonitor.
Half of shoppers say they would cut back on buying new clothes and shoes, while 41 per cent say they will be reducing the amount they spent on cosmetics and fragrances.

Meanwhile, ostentatious consumerism is out, as shoppers are uncomfortable about flaunting wealth in more austere times. As a result, retailers are beginning to replace branded handbags and other high end goods with more subtle items."

I am tempted to ask if this is temporary or here to stay?  The outcome that the article highlights is "...that spending in the US, which currently accounts for 72 per cent of gross domestic product, should move back to its historical level of 66 per cent."

The more likely scenario that is emerging is that the consumerism begun through the design innovation of Raymond Loewy may merge into socially responsible products being the pull from the shopper and consumer.  This seems to be the case as stated multiple times else where in the "World Retailing", specifically in the article "Green moves make savings".  Another one is the growth of eCommerce creating a completely new sector rather than a sales channel.

If you would like to read this and other articles in the World Retailing, download the complete file here.

India's National Institute of Design

I am always inspired by some excellent work at the Young Designers website of National Institute of Design in India, see various examples related to communication, interdisciplinary, industrial, textile and IT here.

Congratulations to the faculty, administration and the students on bringing the institute through to its 50 years this year.  I hope to visit in person one day!

See the NID's website here.

User Centric Design is Dead

Found at Design Sojourn "User Centered Design Innovation is Dead", details here.  Reminds me of a Steve Jobs quote - "You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new."